


So Much of My Heart

by alexcat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, First Love, Minor Injuries, Missions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:54:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23840401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexcat/pseuds/alexcat
Summary: Ahsoka has always loved her master. Should she tell him?
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker/Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 3
Kudos: 61
Collections: May the 4th Be With You Star Wars Fanworks Exchange 2020, Of Elves and Men





	So Much of My Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LittleRaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/gifts).



> “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.”  
> ― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing 
> 
> For MaytheFourthBewithYou
> 
> I used a name generator for the alien girl, Xilaren Gorgiou, and the planet, Ertol. Odilek I made up myself. The odilek look a lot like twi'lek and maybe a little like Ahsoka herself. I have always found the SW women with Lekku and Montrails to be gorgeous.

Ahsoka called him Master for several years, but her heart had always called him Anakin. She had known when she was fourteen that she loved her tall, handsome Jedi Master. She also knew that love among the Jedi was discouraged by the older Jedi of the Order, like Master Yoda and Master Windu. 

She didn’t care. 

She’d learned one important thing from Master Sky—from Anakin. It was much more important to do what you thought was right than to follow a lot of rules made by the Jedi hundreds of years ago. All the years in the Jedi Academy and in living among all the other Jedi had not convinced her that the solitary life was for her. 

While she had been on a mission to guard a senator on a goodwill tour with the Clones, her master and Obi-wan had been on some supposedly uninhabited Rim world, trying to establish a listening post without the Separatists and Dooku getting wind of it. 

She had just completed her mission successfully when they got a distress signal from Anakin. There was no time to even return the senator to Coruscant before going after her master and Obi-wan. It wouldn’t be the first rescue mission she’d mounted. Anakin was not known for his caution or his discretion. 

Dooku had obviously found the world first and sent Ventress to set up a base there for his droid armies. Anakin and Obi-wan had gotten in the way and had clashed with Ventress and an overwhelming number of droids. 

Ahsoka knew that Anakin always fought with reckless abandon and was sure he’d done it again. She understood him, but she wished sometimes he had a little more consideration for his friends. Obi-wan had assured her that he had always been this way and he’d not singled her out to worry and annoy. 

The Separatists didn’t pay much mind to her sweeping in and picking up Anakin and Obi-wan from the planet’s surface. Obi-wan took the helm as Ahsoka helped her master into the tiny medical bay in the back of the ship. 

“You’ve done it again, Master,” she said as she helped him out of his Jedi robes and began cutting his trousers away from the long, bloody wound on his thigh. It wasn’t the first time she’d done this, either. It wasn’t the first time she noticed how well her master was formed either. 

“Where is the medical droid?” Anakin asked. 

“I left him behind. I’m your doctor for this one. Did Ventress slice you open?” she asked him. She used a bacta spray to clean the jagged wound. 

“No. I tripped and fell after fighting her and cut it on the jagged edge of a hole in the floor of the fighter Obi-wan was flying.” He did have the good grace to look a little sheepish. 

“Master, you are a walking disaster sometimes.” She sighed and looked at the now clean cut. It was quite long, over a foot and went from just above his knee on the inside of his thigh up almost to his crotch. “When we get back to the ship, we can put you in the small bacta tank and heal it, but for now, I’m afraid a bandage is what you get. And if you’re good, I’ll see if we have an injection for the pain.” 

“I’m okay, Ahsoka. It doesn’t hurt too badly.” 

She sat down beside him and looked over at him. When she’d first come to him, she’d been small, not fully mature but now, she was nearly as tall as he was. She was no longer childlike either. She had begun to come into the beauty of the Togruta female; her body was becoming long limbed and powerful and her face was losing its adolescent chubbiness. She was beginning to feel a longing to be more than Anakin’s apprentice as well. He was only four or five years older than she was. 

She smiled and got up to finish the bandaging. “I can’t mend you trousers, Master. Maybe there are some that will fit here somewhere.” She looked in the storage locker and found a pair of trousers though they were a little short. And bright red. She held them up and smiled. “Here you go, Master. Perhaps we can take you to a pleasure planet with these pants on.” 

Anakin grabbed them. “Not sure they’ll give me much pleasure.” He gingerly put them on over his bandaged leg. When he stood on one foot, the trousers came no farther down than his shins. “What would you pay for a man who wore these things?” 

Ahsoka laughed and said, “Master, you are pleasant to look at, no matter what you wear.” 

Anakin grumped. “I’m glad you think so.” 

She stood and looked at him a few moments, her mind on how much she cared for him, then she turned and fled, going back to help Rex get them home. 

She left Anakin to rest until they reached the battle group they were a part of right now. She needed some time to think. It was getting more difficult to be around him without showing him more affection than was proper for a padawan. 

“Is he on the mend?” Obi-wan asked her, coming to stand beside her on the bridge. 

She nodded. “He scares me sometimes, Master Obi-wan. He acts without thought.”

“Well, Yoda thought having an apprentice would make him more given to thinking before he acted, but that has been a true failure.” He smiled when he said it, clearly fond of Anakin. “I could never do anything with him either and he was only nine when my master and I found him on Tatooine.” 

A few days later, Ahsoka was assigned to take the Clones and Obi-wan on a mission to find a Separatist turncoat and find out what she knew about bases that they had not yet uncovered. Anakin was not supposed to go with them, but he declared at the last moment that no one was taking the _Twilight_ out without him. 

He flew the ship while Ahsoka was his side.

“You will stay on the ship, won’t you, Master?”

“I can walk with crutches if I’m careful,” he told her with a grin.

“You don’t know the meaning of the word careful, Master. You should stay here in case we need to get away in a hurry. You know how these things go sometimes.” 

Ahsoka even got Obi-wan to weigh in and finally Anakin said he would stay on the ship. The others went down to the planet surface to meet with Xilaren Gorgiou, their informant. She was a humanoid from a planet on the rim called Ertol. She resembled the Twi’lek of Ryloth but Ahsoka had never anyone exactly like her before. 

“I can’t talk long,” she told them. “I do not wish to be caught. They feed traitors to their pets here.” 

“Are you a slave?” Ahsoka asked her, realizing that she wasn’t a turncoat but a scared girl who was forced to work for the enemy. 

The girl nodded. “My people are native to this planet. The strangers came here a few years ago and convinced our elders that they knew a better way. Our elders were foolish old men and allowed the strangers to bring in their armies of droids and their governor and the next thing we knew, all the young were rounded up to labor for the strangers while our elders went hungry.”

“Are there many of you?” Ahsoka leaned forward. She hated to see any people enslaved. It was one of the reasons she fought. She had been almost sold as a Force slave herself. 

“Our people are not as many as once there were. Many have died from hunger. Many have been killed for disobedience. We do not have young anymore since we are not allowed to be with our tribes.”

Ahsoka was all for breaking their new friend’s people free, but Obi-wan was much more cautious. He got the information from the girl and promised to send some help as soon as they could. They went to the port to find their ship and saw a familiar face darting about. 

Ventress. 

“I might have known she’d be here,” Obi-wan told Ahsoka as they were about to board their ship. 

“Are we going to let her get away?” Both Ahsoka and Obi-wan turned to find Anakin behind them. 

Ahsoka narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you doing here?” 

“The ship’s sensors detected her coming in.”

“And you couldn’t just let us know?” Obi-wan asked him with his annoyed at Anakin tone. 

“I thought you might need me.” 

“I suggest we get out of here,” Obi-wan said. 

“Too late,” Ahsoka drew her light sabers and nodded toward Ventress, who was darting her way toward them.

“I might have known _you’d_ be here, Obi-wan, and I see you brought your annoying pets. Looks like Skywalker is still smarting from our last encounter.” Ventress landed in front of them. 

“What are you doing here, Ventress? Following me?” Obi-wan asked her, his voice as full of sarcasm and that tiny bit of innuendo that was always there when he spoke to her. 

“My master wonders why you’re here.” 

“We’re just out on a goodwill trip. We do that, you know,” Ahsoka told her. 

“Your pets are mouthy, Obi-wan.”

Obi-wan and Anakin both drew their sabers at the same time. They all advanced on Ventress. She flipped and bounced off one wall then another until she was the top of the spaceport hangar. 

“Let’s get out of here,” Obi-wan told them.

“What about Xilaren and her people?” Ahsoka asked. 

“We can’t take them all now anyway. We have the information and we can send troops and a transport back for the people,” Obi-wan told her. “Right now, we need to go!”

Despite her misgivings, she followed Obi-wan and her master and they left Ertol as quickly as possible. 

Once aboard the ship, Ahsoka cornered Anakin and fumed over leaving the planet. “We have to help them! The droid armies will destroy them all.” 

“We will, Snips. As soon as we get home, I’ll contact Padme and see if she can find a home for them before we move them off the planet. They will need somewhere to go.”

She knew all these things, but she was impatient. Master Yoda had said she would learn patience as Anakin’s padawan. He might not have been right about her actually learning that virtue. If anything, she might have become less patient than she’d been before. 

She helped Anakin redress the wound on his leg. It was much better, the bacta having almost healed it. She ran a finger beside the red scar that was forming. She had an urge to lick it, a wound healing practice that her people had employed for many generations.

“Thank you for taking care of me, Snips.” He patted the seat beside him and she sat. He put an arm around her shoulder and kissed her forehead. She looked into his eyes and for a moment, she thought he might kiss her. The moment passed and she busied herself with cleaning up from changing Anakin’s bandage. 

Later, in her own bed, she wondered if he even thought of her as a grown up woman or if he still saw her as a child. He wasn’t that much older, about four or five years, she thought. As she drifted to sleep, she thought that maybe someday he’d see her for what she was and realize that she loved him. She had always loved him. 

The Jedi Council argued long over what to do about Ertol and its Odilek residents. They were already enslaved and impoverished and they feared that they would be punished further for their involvement with the Jedi. 

Obi-wan spoke for their new friend and for her people. He was always so reasonable and calm, Ahsoka thought, especially compared to her and her master. Anakin almost always acted out of passion and so did she. This did not always gain favor with Master Yoda and the Council. 

After debating for many hours, the Council finally decided that they would relocate the native people of Ertol to another planet similar to it that was also on the Rim. They proposed to send a different Jedi to move the Odilek people, but Obi-wan persuaded them to allow him, Anakin and their crew to do the job themselves. 

They were back on Ertol in a few days. Much had changed in only two short weeks. Count Dooku had moved in several more brigades of droids to defend his newest colony. They found Xilaren and her family. Many of their friends and neighbors had begun to disappear from their homes. They all knew it was the Separatists. 

“How many of your people are still free of Dooku?” Anakin asked Xilaren. 

“There are several hundred of us. We live in the caves in the mountains and foothills, away from prying eyes,” she told them. “How will you take us all? And where?” 

Anakin answered her. “We have transport ships waiting just outside the system for our signal. Padme Amidala, senator from Naboo, will lead you all to your new planet. You will be given the things you need to get started there and you will have protection as well from Dooku and his armies.”

She smiled. Ahsoka patted her arm. “We will find the others as well.” 

The transports were guarded by several Republic gunships as they landed and began loading the Odilek people. The Jedi and their Clone armies fought off the droids as they attacked in wave after wave. Several other Jedi joined Anakin, Ahsoka and Obi-wan as they fought. Despite his injuries, Anakin still sliced through the droids like a knife, leaving droid parts littering the ground in his wake.

Once the last transport was on its way, the Jedi and the Clones advanced, pushing the droids back, wiping out hundreds of them, but leaving a few to retreat back to their nest, wherever that was. They knew that Ventress would be there somewhere, too. She was most likely their only way to find the rest of the Odilek people. Obi-wan fell back to guard their rear and Anakin and Ahsoka chased the droids back toward the one city on the planet. 

Anakin was still bothered by his injury but he never let pain bother him. Worrying about him was everyone else’s job, especially Ahsoka. The two of them headed toward the city in a couple of landspeeders. They’d find transportation for the Odilek people once they found them. 

Ventress was waiting for them on the steps of the city’s government center. 

“Hello, Jedi. Where is Obi-wan?” she called out to them. 

“He’s busy,” Ahsoka yelled back. “We can take care of the likes of you.”

Ventress did one of her flips and landed directly in front on Anakin. “Still injured, Jedi?” she taunted him. He charged her while Ahsoka and the Clones took advantage and headed into the government building. 

Once inside, Ahsoka said, “Now where would I hide a large group of people here in a crowded city?” 

“Perhaps there is a basement to this building?” one of the Clones asked. 

“Let’s split up. Whoever finds it, message the rest. I don’t know how long Master Skywalker can hold Ventress,” Ahsoka told them and they all took off, running in different directions. 

Ahsoka found a huge set of double doors that were locked and chained closed. She cut the chain and threw open the doors. Dozens of Odileks of all ages sat around on the floor of the room. Many of them rose in fear as Ahsoka crashed into the room. 

“I am a Jedi and we’ve come to help you escape. The rest of your people are on transports to a new home away from the Separatists.”

“You’re awfully small for a ‘we’,” one man said as several clones ran up behind her. 

“Ahsoka, we’ve found another way out from down here so we won’t come out right in front of the building. If we can get these people to the edge of town, then I think we can call in a transport big enough to carry them all and they can resettle with the rest of their people.”

“Let’s move!” Ahsokas shouted and they all began to file out of the room as fast as they could. Several were older people and some were parents with small children so Ahsoka and the clones helped them. 

Ahsoka had called Obi-wan to send something to the edge of town to haul these people out. She sent the clones to protect them. 

“I’m going back to find my master,” she told them as she ran back to the front of the building. 

Ventress had Anakin cornered. He was injured, maybe a new injury for all Ahsoka knew, as she pressed him farther and farther toward the empty building. She stayed in the shadows and watched for her opportunity to stop Ventress. They just needed to get away, not kill her. That never seemed quite possible anyway. 

Anakin was still fighting though he was nearly immobile. Ahsoka came jumping in from atop a nearby roof and sent Dooku’s right hand flying. 

“Ah, there’s your pet, Skywalker! Do you keep her in a kennel?” Ventress said when she gained her footing.

“Can you get up, Master?” she asked him and she fought off Ventress. 

“I can but I can’t walk very well.”

“You won’t have to walk far. R2 is bringing our ride to us.” 

And there he was, R2D2, in a small two man flyer that was for planetary use only. They’d have to catch up with the others to get back to their ships. 

They flew around to the rendezvous area and the last transport was loading. The two Jedi and R2D2 boarded just in time to be out of range by the time Ventress came around the building and found them. 

As soon as they were back on their Jedi Cruiser, Ahsoka helped Anakin to his quarters. 

“Are you sure you won’t go to the bacta tank again, Master?” The wound on her leg had been injured again and was bleeding, though not very much. 

“Help me clean it and bandage it and I’ll be fine. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

She clucked and fussed over him until she had redressed the wound. It had healed quite a bit. Ahsoka sat on the edge of his bed, obviously quite tired herself. 

“I’ll check back in the morning, Master.” She started to leave. 

“Don’t go,” he said, very quietly. 

She turned back. Surely he knew how she felt about him. She’d never said anything, but found that she’d also been quite incapable of lying to him about it either. 

“What do you need, Master?” 

“Anakin. Please.” 

She walked back to his bed and sat on the edge of it. “What do you need, Anakin?” 

He looked at her oddly for a moment, as if thinking about how to say something. He opened his mouth then closed it. He cleared his throat. “Stay here with me tonight, Ahsoka.” When she didn’t say anything, he plunged ahead. “In my bed. With me.” 

She’d wanted this more than anything. She remembered the teaching of the Jedi – attachments were wrong. They served a higher purpose. But what higher purpose was there than love? 

She was not a child any longer – she knew it and so did her master. 

She nodded and reached for his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> My [**Tumblr**](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/alexcat45).


End file.
